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Track Listings
| 1. Our Prayer | |||
| 2. Gee | |||
| 3. Heroes and Villains | |||
| 4. Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock) | |||
| 5. I'm in Great Shape | |||
| 6. Barnyard | |||
| 7. My only Sunshine (The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine) | |||
| 8. Cabin Essence | |||
| 9. Wonderful | |||
| 10. Look (Song for Children) | |||
| 11. Child is Father of the Man | |||
| 12. Surf's Up | |||
| 13. I Wanna be Around / Workshop | |||
| 14. Vega - Tables | |||
| 15. Holidays | |||
| 16. Wind Chimes | |||
| 17. The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O'Leary's Cow) | |||
| 18. Love to Say Dada | |||
| 19. Good Vibrations | |||
| 20. You're Welcome | |||
See all 28 tracks on this disc
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Product Description
Product Description
Between the summer of 1966 and early 1967, The Beach Boys recorded a bounty of songs and drafts for an album, SMiLE, that was intended to follow the band's 1966 masterpiece, Pet Sounds.
The SMiLE Sessions presents the recording sessions for the album, which achieved legendary, mythical status for music fans around the world.
Review
It all started with SMiLE's closing statement Good Vibrations, a 1966 number one and mini-masterpiece that reputedly took Wilson a year to complete as he experimented with ‘modular’ recording. Despite the sheer ball-ache, the modular method – the recording of individual elements that could be grafted together at a later date – was to inform the creation of this entire album, a move that put session musicians through ridiculous paces and tried the patience of Capitol Records and the other Beach Boys to such a degree that something had to give. That something was the actual release of the record.
That's one take, anyway. Memories are fuzzy, but the music now it's here is pure and gorgeous, the familiar mesh of brotherly voices exquisite as ever. Its glittering peaks are singles Good Vibrations and Heroes and Villains, along with Surf's Up (a different recording from the finale of its 1971 album), harmonic jewel Our Prayer and Wonderful (far prettier and fuller than its cousin on Smiley Smile); but Wilson and Parks had envisaged SMiLE as a song cycle, a "cartoon consciousness" in Parks' own words, that would be naturally symbiotic, the songs hanging together as one. All the sadder, then, that it was shelved and then filleted for ensuing albums.
Some constituents aren't perfect, with Wilson's sillier side peeking out on beautifully constructed follies like Holidays, Barnyard and Vega-Tables of course, but even at their least remarkable these are stepping stones to the good stuff. And, my, if you want stepping stones (remarkable or otherwise) The SMiLE Sessions has got 'em: the standard release is one CD with the cherishable album and another with the best of the earlier/alternative takes, but if you're prepared to remortgage your sandbox you can get five CDs of this, serving up each fascinating (and occasionally less fascinating) ‘module’. Not to mention a 3D SMiLE shop and custom-built surfboard. That's one for completists, then. But your Beach Boys collection hasn't been complete until now, has it? --Matthew Horton
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
Customer Reviews
The packaging on the 2cd box is very nice and the 2nd cd is worth having for the stripped-bare versions of Surf's Up alone.
As for the songs themselves well you have to listen from start to finish as most of the tracks aren't designed to be listened to in isolation, Side Two of Abbey Road by The Beatles is a reasonable comparison though many of these songs don't have verses unlike that long medley.
The highlights and possible exceptions to this would be Heroes And Villains, Good Vibrations, and the wonderful Surf's Up which has to be one of the finest songs of this or any era (even if the lyrics don't make any sense!).
Jimi Hendrix referred to the Beach Boys around this period as sounding like "a psychedelic barber's shop quartet" as if that was a bad thing, it's actually a very good description of the album - you'll either like it or hate it depending on whether you fancy hearing such a thing.
I agree with what Brian says that this really is ahead of its time and was way too alternate even for back then. This type of creativity could only be fully appreciated by today's culture of anything goes (postmodernism). I'm not even going to make comparisons with Pet Sounds as that is meaningless when dealing with a creative exposition of this type, suffice to say that it is not easy listening BUT essential listening. It's the type of art work that grows on you each time of listening. It is definitely as important a musical statement as Pepper and will no doubt go down in the music history books as an extraordinary musical offering from a genius who, although whilst writing the music went completely mad and lost interest in life, eventually came back to tell us all of the dark journey. Was it a price worth paying? I would say definitely!
1. As a package the 2 cd set is very good value (19 track Smile song suite plus 21 session tracks.)
2. The sound is fantastic. Very bassy. I am hearing things on some of these songs that I've never heard before.
3. The bonus tracks from recording sessions are well worth having. Again sound is superb. Solo Surf's Up a gem.
4. The boxed packaging is fine but there are no details of who is playing on the sessions, and it would have been nice to have had session dates for all the tracks. (Only given for cd2.)
5. If I had one word to describe the music it would be 'arcane'.
That's all Folks!
booklet in my double cd version could have been better would have liked
the song pictures... Read more
the US would never have accepted SMiLE back in 1967. Read more
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